The alternative would be a kind of death inside of each other. As Pig and Runt, who have through their lives acted almost as one organism, are torn out of childhood, they find themselves for really the first time harboring conflicting desires that push them into a kind of second birth that tear them out of the womb of imagination and childhood friendship into new worlds and experiences necessary for the creation of themselves as individuals. Rightfully beginning with a scene of birth, Disco Pigs is a play about excisions, often violent ones at that. But with the approach of their seventeenth year, and accompanying sexual awakenings and dawning awareness of love, and different kinds of love, Runt begins to wonder what might lie outside the world they have constructed for themselves and to yearn for her own individuality apart from Pig. They invent their own games and routines-cum-rituals involving drinking, fighting and television.

It’s a world in which Cork City becomes Pork City and the dialect thereof mutates into a language wholly that of the two friends. Runt was born in the same hospital at the same time as her best friend, Pig, with whom she has through childhood built an inseparable bond-indeed, more than a bond, practically a world unto themselves. This is the central question asked by the character Runt in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs. Colin Campbell and Evanna Lynch in DISCO PIGS at Irish Rep - photo by Jeremy Daniel

Disco pigs